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Holland’s Green Light District

Things are looking up in this green Dutch town. In a mainly pedestrian street adjacent to a shopping mall in Eindhoven, one of the greenest cities in the Netherlands, design firm BYTR suggested that public space be cleared of lampposts and small planters to allow for their contribution to the city’s greening effort.

Their design, Greenspotlight combines the two elements of greenery and street lighting into a single integrated design: a public space green public light whose shade is formed from living plants utilizing a ring of integrated planters at the bottom. The lights are hung from cables between the walls of the street’s buildings.

At risk of sounding like a troll, this seems like non-functional eye candy in the lets-put-plants-on-it-and-call-it-“green” school of design. One of the greatest inefficiencies in outdoor lighting is the loss of ambient light that doesn’t go into lighting what you’re trying to light.

By using plants as a shade there is ‘waste light’ that is absorbed by the dark vegetation, rather than lighting the street. If a reflector had been used, to cast all light down onto the street, lower wattage bulbs could have been used and electricity saved.

I’m all for putting plants on things, but this seems counterintuitive.

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